In honour of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir’s forthcoming concerts in Washington, and in honour of their recent film, The Song Keepers, I re-publish this 2003 article about the premiere of Journey to Horseshoe Bend, which featured one of their predecessor organizations, the Ntaria Ladies Choir. (Please be advised that this article may contain […]

Have film screenings with live orchestra really been around so long? Jon Burlingame writing in Variety in 2013[1], cites a 1987 live screening of Eisenstein and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as the ‘light bulb’ moment when Steven Linder of IMG Artists realized these could be a thing. Thirty years! Is […]

Loretta: That was so awful. Ronny: Awful? Loretta: Beautiful… sad. She died! John Patrick Shanley Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987) In the 1987 film, Moonstruck, Ronny Cammareri (Nicholas Cage) woos Loretta Castorini (Cher) by taking her to La bohème at ‘the Met’. In the Third Act, as the two principals on stage touch hands through […]

In Act III of Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, the Prince has found his true-love, the last of three fantastic oranges, Princess Ninetta, and saved her with a refreshing drink. ‘At last, a real fairytale with tunes that we can hum’ sing the commentators, the ‘Lyrics’, in Tom Stoppard’s translation of Prokofiev’s libretto. Except that […]

We’ve been down to Olvera Street in Downtown many times. Historically, it’s important as the site of the original Los Angeles pueblo. The oldest house in the city is there – the Avila Adobe (1818). But recently we noticed a make-shift sign next to a doorway. It pointed out that thousands of people pass this […]

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) Parsifal, Act II: Prelude… ‘Parsifal! – Weile!’… (Parsifal, stay!) Parsifal, first performed in 1882, was Wagner’s last opera, or music drama, as he called his stage works. There is evidence to suggest he knew it would be his last statement on themes that had obsessed him throughout his life – the conflicts […]

Writer Bob Gale was visiting his family home in Missouri. In the basement he found an old High School Yearbook photo of his father. The discovery set Gale wondering: would he and his father have been friends if they’d gone to school together? With that, Gale came up with the idea of a teenager travelling […]

I have always suspected that works of art are the result of greater collaboration than the proponents of auteurism would want us to believe. I love Billy Mernit’s phrase in Cut to the Chase about movies benefitting from ‘a spirit of collaboration that once yielded cathedrals’. Now, The Guardian reveals (Oct 23, 2016) that Christopher Marlowe’s name […]

Simon Boccanegra contains some of Verdi’s finest music from any period of his career. It’s undoubtedly a masterpiece. But it has problems – ‘…profound score but convoluted plot’, said Anthony Tommasini in an April 2016 New York Times review of a production at the Met. We can’t ignore those problems really; a theatre audience is […]

In the chapter on Mask work in his acting book Impro, Keith Johnstone tells of how masks impart their information (physiological, psychological) to actors who wear them, so that no matter the personal characteristics of the wearer, the wearer conforms to the behaviour of the Mask. Says Johnstone: Another Mask was called Mr Parks. This one […]